Sarah Exhibits Child

[tamaranth]

This post left public for Those With No LJ. lproven will recognise the usual suspects.
Went to inspect my friends Sam & Sarah's offspring (born June 19th) today. (Child was inspected a couple of weeks ago but I forgot to take camera, so that trip was useless in terms of hard evidence).

This time fellow ex-fencer Sharon took me on her bike (Honda CB400). I was her first ever pillion passenger: she was the first to take me as pillion passenger this century. (I think the last time I was pillion on a solo 'bike was on the Isle of Man, possibly with pugwash). It was the hottest day of the year. Mmm, heavy-duty leather gear ...

Nice evening for the return trip, though. I was almost cool by the time we got back.

Photographic evidence (captions on mouseover, probably)


Interesting that the quality is so appalling when I shrink high-quality images, as opposed to taking medium-quality ones to start with ...

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

with high-quality images the pixels it picks are further apart so you see more discontinuities. better image editing software allows for this; see if you can pick a smart resize or bicubic interpolation

[red-cloud.livejournal.com]

Agreed. It looks like you're doing a PIXEL RESIZE when you shrink your images, which means your image editing software is applying a simple rule along the lines of "pick every fourth pixel". This is very quick (and is used in some browsers to shrink images "on the fly"), but you do end up with that "blocky" look. Other resize options may be available in your image editor. These will apply more sensible algorithms based on groups of pixels.

Also, be sure you convert your original JPEGs to a bitmapped format (such as Windows BMP or whatever proprietary format your image editing software uses) before and during any editing, only converting back to JPEG for the final web image. This is because each save/load cycle for a JPEG introduces (unwanted) compression which will "throw away" bits of your image.